


Dichtung und Wahrheit, or: How Nicky Hemmick Learned To Have Some Pride

by luvanderwon



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Backstory, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:12:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10983123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: In which Nicky Hemmick embarks on the slow process of learning how to be okay with being both gay and Christian, and how Erik Klose was the lynchpin that held him together. Featuring: teenage angst, clumsy Deutsch, inappropriate sweaty crushes, first kisses, and finding the road to recovery.





	1. Of Sins and Salvation

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals with Nicky's backstory, so it includes a lot of references to religion, doubt, "ex-gay" camps, and homophobia - both internalised by Nicky and verbalised by other characters. There are mentions of depression and therapy (which is not always helpful) throughout. A lot of these things are from Nicky's secret diary, and thus written in (intentionally awkward and fumbling) German - you can hover over the text for a translation to English and there are also footnotes if the hover function doesn't work for you. 
> 
> Passing, brief mentions of suicidal ideation, and anti-Semitism. No on-screen violence, torture, or abuse of anyone. Please let me know if you think I should mention anything else here! 
> 
> This is set in the late 90s / early 2000s - sorry not sorry for the nostalgic references to fashion disasters, questionable pop culture, and terms of endearment/insult. 
> 
> Many thanks to Anna (moonix) for encouragement and faith in me, super-swift beta reading and not laughing at my dodgy German skills, and to Crystal (capncrystal) for Ameripicking!
> 
>  **PLEASE NOTE:** I am not active in the AFTG fandom and don't engage with it anymore since I wrote this. I've left this particular fic up here as the comments it has received imply it's something that matters to a lot of people and I don't want to undo or remove that. I hope it continues to be an enjoyable read for people, and thank you to everyone who has left feedback, I am so happy you found your way here!

Here is what Nicky Hemmick knows at the age of sixteen and ten months: the German verb _weihen_ means _consecrate_ , there are fifty-three references to repentance in the New Testament, the best peaches come from McLeod’s of McBee near his grandmother’s house, and when he dies he is going to Hell.

Some days, Hell sounds like a better option than Columbia.

There is a demon inside Nicky. He knows this the same way he knows that God is good, that his mother is Mexican, and that his birthday falls on May 23rd. There are nights when the demon makes a nest in his heart, drumming its delinquent desires against his ribcage. Worse are the nights when it dances down his body, makes his stomach trip over its feet; insists that Nicky can get rid of it, can exorcise himself, tricks him into masturbation and won’t let him finish until he thinks about men.

That’s double the sin. 2 Corinthians 7:1. The demon is a liar. Its trickery runs in circles: first it makes Nicky homosexual; then convinces him he can purify himself through committing a lesser sin; only to use that lesser sin to cement itself further in his body.

At sixteen, Nicky knows he isn’t supposed to understand exactly what his body – half-boy, half-man – wants or is doing most of the time. At sixteen, Nicky wishes that were true and that he knew a little less.

 

_ Mein Name ist Nicky. Mein Eltern denken das Tagebuch ist Schulewerk, aber es ist für mich. Ich habe ein kampf, und kein Person kannt mir helfen. Vielleicht in schrieben, ich kann okay sein. Das ist der kampf: ich bin ein Christian, mein Vater ist ein Minister, wir wohnen in Sud Carolina, und ich bin schwul.  _

_Letzten Sommer, ich war an ein Lager für Schwule Umwandlungstherapie gesenden. Es war nicht gut, und nicht hilfe. Ich bin schwul und keine liebe von Gott, oder Gebetter für mir, wird sich es veränden. Ich kenne, ich werde gehen zu Hölle. Aber vielleicht mit mehr Gebetter und mehr Glauben, wann ich versuche zu gut sein, es wird sein besser. Ich denke nicht es gibt ein hoffe, so mein Gebetter sind für nix, aber das ist alles ich habe._ [1]

The camp still gives him nightmares.

Nicky’s current therapist, a man his father knows from his seminary days and who lives and preaches out near Aiken, tells him to remember the things he learned there: the prayers, the methods; the truth. He tells Nicky to write these things down, record them; remind himself every time he feels he is struggling or relapsing. He says it will help Nicky to overcome his unhealthy and unnatural urges.

His language has the same cold, damp, grey tone as the camp administrators’. He talks of _struggles_ and _challenges_ and _tests_ , cites Matthew 4:1 and Joel 2:25. There is less of the uncomfortable physicality here, fewer awkward touches and no ice against his skin, but Nicky recognises that this therapy is aimed at keeping him on God’s good side, not bringing him back from the bad and blasphemous. That job is supposed to have been done. The demon is supposed to be eradicated.

Inside his gut, Nicky feels laughter, the slow nausea of anxiety; the hysteria that bubbles on the back of his tongue when he knows he is lying. His therapist tells him to remember the truth he learned at Exodus International. He means the truth that was preached there, but that is not Nicky’s truth; not what Nicky learned at all.

_ Die ersten Zeit, wann ich schwuldenken gehaben, ich war zwölf Jahre alt. Ein Junge in mein schule, mein Freund, augen so blau er gehaben, und Sommersprossen am seine Nase, und alles ich gewillst, wast sein Hand zu halten. Sein Name war Jake. Ich gewillst mein Haustiere und mein Kinder, namener Jake auch, sein Name war für mich die beste ding ich habe gehören! Ich bin noch ein Sauger für ein Junge mit blauen Augen... **[2]** _

He collects sins like they are South Carolina’s yellow jessamine flowers, pressed flat between the pages of his Bible; sticky golden juice running between the pages and staining his fingers amber.

Yellow jessamine smells spicy, sickly sweet; the cloying perfume of a sweaty summer night thick in the throat. Once, they were used to heal measles. They are creeping and insidious, inveigling their way along sidewalks and over mailboxes, up tree trunks and through the undergrowth.

Leviticus 18:22. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Leviticus 20:13. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. Nicky knows four German words for ‘abominable’: _abscheulich, ekelhaft, gräβlich_ and _gemein._ Some nights, he chants them in his mind; uses their guttural, earthy sounds to stave off the midnight visions that rise, unbidden: Matthew Wilson climbing out of the swimming pool, Andy Pensworth sucking on the end of his pen in algebra class; the single bead of sweat trickling down the back of Calvin Crawford’s neck last Sunday in church when he bent his head to pray. _Abscheulich, ekelhaft, gräβlich, gemein. Abscheulich, ekelhaft, gräβlich, gemein._

Nicky likes the way the German language feels in his mouth. It’s deeper, drier than his American English, like German is closer to the soil; in touch with something older than America. He enjoys the challenge of flattening his tongue to shape vowel sounds that feel richer than his own.

“Of course,” his father nods, approvingly. “It is Martin Luther’s language, after all. Without German, we might not even know Jesus.”

That, Nicky thinks, is not what he meant.

 

_ Ich muβ mehr hart versuchen. Ich muβ mehr gebetst. Ich kenne Gott ist gut, ich kenne Jesus mir liebt. Ich muβ die Glauben hast, es gibt eine Heilen für mir. Gott hat ein Plan. Das ist ein Test, das ist alles. Ich kann besser bekommen. Jesus sagt "liebe der Sünder", so er muβt noch liebe mir, richtig? _

_Mein Vater sagt wann ich bin besser, ich kann eine zweiter Taufe haben. Ich werde nochmals in Christ zu geburts, und mein Sünde, und meine kampfen, nicht mehr werde leben._

_(Es ist ein Fantasie. ich stets werde ein Sünder sein, weil ich stets werde schwul.) **[3]**_

 

The first time Nicky kisses a boy is the day before his fifteenth birthday.

Zachary Goldman plays the trumpet in the school marching band. He’s chubby and curly-haired, freckled and handsome in a pudgy, baby-faced sort of way. His trousers are always fractionally too short, like he gets a growth spurt a week after wearing them when it’s too late to change them for the next size. Nicky suspects he or his mother washes them at too high a temperature. Zachary wears linen slacks. Linen shouldn’t be washed higher than 140.

Most importantly, Zachary hasn’t been raised Southern Baptist. He isn’t Baptist at all; he isn’t even Christian. In the back of Nicky’s mind is the nagging, prickly thought that Zachary with his Jewry is the sort of person a member of his church should want to convert. Romans 1:16. Last winter, Nicky had attended an ugly sermon on Jewish Evangelism and the need for Christian people to commit to bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to their Jewish brethren, to whom they were indebted for the reception of Scripture and Saviour, to whom all followers of Christ had a duty to pray for the salvation of and a duty to help the beloved but blinkered Jews to come to their Messiah. Nicky had felt itchy and out of place throughout that sermon, as he sat biting his lip and squeezing his fingers together tightly in his lap. At home, he’d asked his mother if what he’d heard didn’t count as anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism is what Nazis practiced, honey,” Maria had petted his hair and insisted. “Anti-Semitism means wanting our Jewish brothers and sisters to be gone. We don’t want that. We want them to be saved.”

Nicky hadn’t had the courage to tell her that if every single Jew was saved in the name of Jesus Christ, then all the Jews would still be gone. The awkward, queasy hypocrisy of religious genocide by evangelism weighed heavy on his shoulders – a yoke stitched with guilt for things he hadn’t done and disgust at things he didn’t want to believe.

He clocks up another sin when he tells his parents that he has made friends with a Jewish boy three days after the Jewish Evangelism sermon. Maria beams at him across the breakfast table, a smear of marmalade caught in the corner of her mouth, and Nicky’s father nods proudly.

“Good work, son,” he murmurs. “He will be welcome in our congregation any time.”

Nicky has no intention of bringing Zachary to his father’s congregation.

Zachary teaches him the Hebrew alphabet, at Nicky’s insistence. The vowels feel rough and round in the back of his mouth, the harsh force of a _khet_ or a _khaf_ sticking to the back of his teeth. His pronunciation is terrible. Nicky doesn’t want it to improve because it makes Zachary laugh, and when he laughs his cheeks crinkle around his nose and his eyes slant upwards a little in their outer corners, and Nicky would quite happily spend entire days watching that happen.

He asks Zachary what his synagogue’s views are on the contentious issues of the day: healthcare, abortion. Kosovo, Clinton; Afghanistan and Iraq. Homosexuality.

Zachary shrugs and says “We’re Reformist. It’s all good. Religion and faith have to progress along with everything else in the world, you know?”

For a terrible moment, Nicky hates Jesus.

When Zachary kisses him two days later, hidden in his bedroom to a murky soundtrack of smoke-grey rain outside, Nicky wants to sob into his mouth. It’s a fat, wet, sloppy mess of a kiss, but it’s Nicky’s first, and he thinks of it as Reformist, like Zachary, too. Everything in the world has to progress, and his kissing skills aren’t any exception.

After seven weeks of making out, Nicky comes out to his parents. Their faces hold all the horror he’s been carrying inside his stomach for the last three years, Leviticus bold and brittle on his father’s brow, sorrow and self-blame transparent in his mother’s tears. It’s an awful, aching scene in the living room. His father shouts, paces, loses all of his mild Ministerial manner that he’s so well-liked for in church. His mother cries and prays and, eventually, begs Luther to stop; to consider; and to pray with her. This isn’t everything, she insists. This isn’t how it has to be. They can get help.

“We will get help,” she tells her son. “We will find something. Someone. You can be saved, Nicholas. You can be born again.”

Nicky can’t meet either of their eyes. All he can hear is Zachary’s voice, low and husky, humming “ _Hineh mah tov umah na'im shevet achim gam yachad”_ [4] in his ear three nights ago. He clenches his hands into fists on his thighs and keeps his head down, bowed under the weight of conservative Christian disapproval, regretting his misfortune not to have been born into a family or a faith that practices what Zachary calls _ahavat chinam_ [5].

When he gets back from Exodus International after the summer, Zachary and his family have moved away. Nicky asks his parents if Zachary left any note or address where Nicky could contact him and they tell him no. It is August, and Nicky is tired and unhappy, sticky and scratchy in his own skin. He doesn’t think he really knows the truth about anything anymore, so he ignores the instinctive wrench in his gut that says they are lying.

_ Ich kenne, es ist schlecht, mein Leben zu nehmen. Ich kenne dass. Aber... aber ich denke das falsch Leben, ich kann nicht... ich bin so müde, müde von diese Unwahrheiten, stets das Vorspiegelung... Therapie macht es schlimmer. Ich werde zu Hölle ohnehin gehen, weil ich bin schwul, so ist es wirklich schlechter, zu gehen fur Selbstmorderin? Ich kenne nicht. Ich kenne nix. Jesus liebt mir, aber ich mir kann nie liebe. Es ist schwierig, denken an die liebt von Jesus, wann mein Vater in mir ein kaputent Sohn seht, und meine Mutter kanst nicht an mir sehen. Ich will guten sein, ein gut Christian, aber ich kann nicht... ich kann nicht, sein ein ding ich bin nicht. Warum ich muβ mit das leben? Mein Seele, kannt es mit Gott bekommen? Kann mein Seele hoffe hat? (nein, nein, nein) **[6]** _

Her name is Deborah. She is a good Christian girl, a Southern Baptist, just like him. They don’t attend the same church, but they go to the same Youth On Mission group. Nicky was a Challenger until he came out. When he got back from conversion camp, a conflicted and miserable shadow of himself who spent most nights weeping prayers into his pillow and who was scared of the feeling of cold water on his skin, he committed himself to the straight life by asking to join Youth On Mission instead.

“Girls can go there,” he reminded his parents. “It might be a good place to meet some new girls.”

In spite of what Exodus had taught about re-engaging with masculine role models and appropriate male/male physicality, Nicky’s mother had tactfully pointed out to his father that it might be crude to send their recently-converted ex-gay son back to a youth group comprised entirely of teenage boys.

“We don’t want him to relapse,” she said, her fingers sharp and brittle on Nicky’s shoulder. He’d tried not to flinch. “He’s doing so well.”

Deborah has golden hair, and a dusting of freckles on her shoulders, and silver braces on her teeth that catch shivers of sunlight when she laughs. Nicky is paired with her for an afternoon of delivering bottles of water to Columbia’s homeless under the sweating, sickly yellow of South Carolina sunshine in September. She chatters about God, and Math homework, sings snatches of her favourite hymns, and sighs prettily whenever she spots a puppy or a baby in a sunhat.

Nicky knows he is supposed to be learning to experience God in his everyday life. What he is actually learning is that the giggling coquettishness of the girls he is spending increasing amounts of time with bores him and makes him want to gather up the sides of his face in a perpetual wince. He doesn’t know if it is the girls themselves or the greasy indoctrination of their faith that makes them talk the way they do, but Nicky has a crush on the eighteen year old boy who is his Mission team’s mentor and he hasn’t been cured of anything except the urge to be honest. What he is learning is that if God has a plan for him, it’s not one that features double-x chromosomes, and that everything he experienced at Exodus was – as he suspected – a filthy, abusive lie.

His hands feel cold; clammy and unsettled. There is a ricochet of acrid dirtiness in his gut and when he blinks back out of his thoughts, registering the brassy glare of the sun and Deborah’s anxious frown asking if he needs to rest a bit, Nicky says: “you want to go out for ice cream sometime?”

Everything about Deborah’s pretty blush, the same shade as the underside of the petals on Nicky’s grandmother’s rose bush, and everything about the way she snags her lip with one of her wired teeth makes his stomach roll. Deborah Morgan is a good girl, sweet and innocent and devout and everything that Nicky knows he is not. She deserves better than him.

But he doesn’t recant when she says yes, shyly, or stop her from bumping their shoulders together affectionately as they go about the rest of their mission ministry.

 

_Manner kannst niemals mit Männer schlafen, welche so wie mit Frauen, es ist ein Abscheu... **[7]**_

 

The clouds look like a tumbled, too-soft ruckus of blankets from above. Nicky has never been in a plane before. He didn’t have a passport until two months ago, his seventeenth birthday present, and here he is flying halfway across the world without anyone to hold his hand or guide him through security.

It should be liberating, but all Nicky feels is a faint swell of alarm somewhere behind his ribs. If they crash, he supposes the flames of the fallout will make a useful precursor to his next life in Hell.

If they crash, at least his parents will remember him as saved and cured. At least his mother will be able to believe she will meet him again in Heaven.

Nicky wonders if that counts as another sin for his collection: leading his parents astray. John 7:12. Sometimes he pictures the smorgasbord of his wickedness like a museum exhibit, laid out under glass for God’s scrutiny. Item number 154: pretending to be saved. Right after item number 153: thoughts of suicide, and 152: telling lies to the innocent, and 151: masturbation, again. Items numbered 1 to 100 are all in an earlier cabinet, labelled “homosexual thoughts”.

His German teacher, Miss Prince, had kept him behind after class back in March and handed him a shrivelled, scrunched up piece of paper. It was chewed and smudged, a scrappy mess of blotchy, leaking ink; and Nicky’s stomach had flipped over on itself as a trickle of horror made its spidery way down his spine.

“Is this yours?” Miss Prince had asked, softly. Nicky had said no, and she had tilted her head to the side like a curious, unfrightened bird, and said “I know your handwriting, Nicky.”

 

_ der Selbstmord_

_der Suizid_

_der Freitod_

_der Selbstmörder_

_der Suizidär_

_die_ _Sünde_

_die_ _Schuld_

_die_ _Versündigung_

_der_ _Frevel_

_mein Wunsch_

_Es wäre besser ich ware Tod_

_  
_

“I would like you to consider something,” Miss Prince continued. “We offer a senior year exchange programme for talented language students, with the JFK school in Berlin. How would you feel about spending your last year of high school there, living with a German host family?" 

Nicky had stared at her. No one had ever considered him talented at anything before, except for his stroppy and rude younger cousin Aaron, who came over with Nicky’s Aunt for lunch after Sunday morning service every week. He liked to call Nicky a buttmunch and drag him into the garden to practice Exy passes, because he played in school and had a fierce need to best other people. Once, Aaron had said “you’re actually pretty good at this”, and although Nicky didn’t really care for sports, it had been nice to have his only known cousin’s approval for five minutes.

“I think a change of scene might be good for you,” Miss Prince said gently, her eyes twin bowls of earthy brown concern. “Columbia can be exhausting. High school can be exhausting.”

“I,” Nicky started, but his tongue was dry and speaking felt like spitting up rust. He managed “yes?”

“I’ll write to your parents,” Miss Prince told him. “Explain what a wonderful opportunity this is, how prestigious; how good it looks to future employers. You’ll come back completely fluent, of course, bilingual.”

“Tri-trilingual,” Nicky whispered. His throat hurt like he had swallowed a handful of dust; a show of fear. “My mother is Mexican.”

“Even better,” Miss Prince winked.

Nicky wet his lips and confessed “my father wants me to go into ministry, like him.”

With a pinch in her brow, Miss Prince adjusted her collar and said “and is that what you want, too?”

Flying over the Atlantic Ocean, Nicky leans his forehead against the small, thick window of the plane and thinks about how that was the first time he’d ever said the word _no_ to something that looked like God.

 

_ Ich kann nicht das ableugnen: Erik ist sehr gut aussehend. Ich meine, er ist SO schön, groβmütig, witzig, liebenswürdig... der am meistern reizvoll Mann, ich je begegnen habe. _

_Ein Problem, freilich._

_Ich bin ein Gast in sein Haus. Hier niemand kennt, ich bin schwul. Ich soll es sein gesundern heutzutage. Nicht schwul. Geheilent. Und doch... hier ist Erik Fucking Klose, mit sein perfekt Körper, sein Lächeln, sein guter Natur und sein Hintern... Gott verdammt, das Hintern. Ich meine... Gott verdammt. Das ist unfair._

_Wie kann ich nicht schwul sein, wann das ist jeden Tagen protzenter, vor meinen Augen... was eine Belastung, was eine Versuchung... ugh. **[8]**_

 

The thing about Berlin is it’s saturated in history. Nicky can’t walk down a street without tripping over something he is sure there must be several books dedicated to analysing – buildings, parks, cafés, street names. Erik, his host brother, is barely eighteen months older than Nicky. He has a laugh like a throat full of spiced liquor, hands that can span Nicky’s entire shoulders, biceps that could fell trees, and he knows everything except whether or not there is a God. Nicky asked him that one.

“Gehst du zur Kirche?” [9] he had asked on his first Saturday night, timid and faltering, this borrowed language still feeling clumsy in his mouth like a shabby, second-hand pair of gloves.

“Ich? Nein,” Erik had shrugged. “Ich weiß nicht, ob ich an Gott glaube. Meine Oma geht, falls du sie begleiten willst.” [10]

“Du kennst nicht?” [11] Nicky had needed to clarify this, a concept so alien to his Southern Baptist brain that it required extra attention. “Zum Gott?”

Erik laughed, clapped an enormous hand on Nicky’s shoulder, and hummed  “Du bist sehr religiös, wa? Tut mir leid, dich zu enttäuschen, Kleiner.” [12]

“So,” Nicky frowned, trying to parse anything other than the warmth of Erik’s palm through his thin t-shirt or the fact that Nicky was fairly certain that _Kleiner_ counted as a term of endearment. “I mean, um, also es ist... es ist okay? Ob ich will nicht in Morgen zu Kirche gehe?” [13]

“Natürlich,” Erik shrugged. “Wie du willst. Wir sind hier nicht so streng. Du kannst selbst entscheiden.” [14]

In that one short conversation, Erik Klose successfully begins the long and complicated process of unravelling all the gnarled and knotted wool of Nicky’s faith.

For the first Sunday that he can recall, Nicky is in full health and yet does not attend a church service. He sleeps late in the slim, soft bed in the guest room – his room – at the Klose apartment in Steglitz. It feels liberal and naughty, like stuffing his face into the pillow so no one will overhear him giggling. He waits for the grey haze of guilt to descend, to crush him to his knees with words of reverence and apology on his lips. It doesn’t come. This feels, Nicky thinks, like Reformism. It feels a little like kissing Zachary and a lot like leaving the United States.

He knows that euphoria never lasts; that this will come back and haunt him; that ditching church and Sunday school and the pious, hometown hypocrisy of South Carolina will not save his soul or make him feel better. Avoiding God won’t reconcile Nicky’s faith with his sexuality or help him feel any less broken.

For now, though, it is a welcome reprieve.

Here is what Nicky Hemmick knows, at the age of seventeen and three months: the word _love_ appears 310 times in the King James Bible, when Erik Klose smiles Nicky forgets to care about the fires of Hell because he’s too busy feeling like a Belinda Carlisle song, Romans 10:9 is the truest verse, and the German noun _die Rettung_ means _salvation._ If Nicky can find that anywhere, he’s pretty sure it’s here.

 

[1] My name is Nicky. My parents think this diary is homework, but it is actually for me. I have a problem no one can help with. Perhaps by writing about it, I can cope. This is the problem: I’m Christian, my father is a minister, we live in South Carolina, and I’m gay. Last summer I was sent to a camp for gay conversion therapy. It wasn’t good and didn’t help. I am gay and none of God’s love, none of my prayers, will change that. I know I’m going to Hell. But maybe, with more prayers and more faith and if I really try to be good, things will get better. I don’t think there is any hope, so my prayers are probably for nothing, but they are all I have.

[2] The first time I thought I was gay, I was 12. A kid in my class, my friend, had such blue eyes and these freckles on his nose, and all I wanted was to hold his hand. His name was Jake. I wanted to call my pets and my future children all Jake too, it was the best name I had heard! I’m still a sucker for a boy with blue eyes...

[3] I must try harder. I must pray more. I know God is good, that Jesus loves me. I need to have faith that there is a cure for me. God has a plan. This is a test, that’s all. I can get better. Jesus says “love the sinner” so he must still love me, right? My father says when I feel better, I can have a second baptism. I can be reborn once again in Christ, and my sins and my struggles will no longer be. (It’s a fantasy. I’ll always be a sinner, because I’ll always be gay).

[4] Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for people to dwell together in unity (Psalm 133:1)

[5] Jewish concept: love that exists purely and without ulterior motives

[6] I know it’s bad to take my own life. I know that. But... but I think a false life, I can’t... I’m so tired. Tired of lying, always pretending... therapy makes it worse. I’m going to Hell anyway for being gay, is it really any worse to go for suicide? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Jesus loves me, but I can’t love myself. It’s hard to think about Jesus’s love when my own father sees his son as broken, and my mother can hardly bear to look at me. I want to be good, a good Christian, but I can’t... I can’t be something I’m not. Why do I have to live with this? Can my soul ever belong to God? Can my soul even hope? (no, no, no)

[7] Man shall not lie with man, as with woman, it is an abomination...

[8] I can’t deny it: Erik is gorgeous. I mean, he is SO nice, attractive, witty, charming...the most attractive guy I’ve ever met. It’s a problem, obviously. I’m a guest in his house. No one here knows I’m gay. I’m supposed to be well again now, anyway. Not gay. Healed. And then... here comes Erik Fucking Klose with his perfect body, his laughter, his good nature, his ass... God damn, that ass... I mean... God damn it. That’s unfair. How can I not be gay, when I have to see this paraded every day in front of my very eyes... what a trial, what a hardship... ugh

[9] Do you go to church?

[10] Me? No. I don’t know if I believe in God. My Grandmother goes though, if you want to go with her.

[11] You don’t know? About God?

[12] You’re really religious, huh? Sorry to disappoint you, kid.

[13] So it’s... it’s okay? If I don’t go to church tomorrow?

[14] Of course. Whatever you want. We’re not so strict, here. You can decide for yourself.


	2. From Ruth to Revelation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nicky tentatively tries to re-engage with religion in Germany, with mixed results; the Klose family are everything he did not expect, and the first steps to flirting with recovery are taken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think there is anything to content warn for that wasn't mentioned in part one, however if you think I should note anything here please do let me know here or on tumblr (seagreenish). There is a tentative re-engagement with religion here, as stated in the summary, and the camp that Nicky was sent to is mentioned towards the end, but not in detail. On the whole, this should be a happier chapter than the first one!
> 
> You'll have to imagine all the dialogue here takes place in German - the only sentence which is actually in German this time has the same translations available as in part one - hover text, and a footnote.
> 
> Much love and gratitude again to Anna and Crystal for beta reading :D

Nicky remembers his father kissing him on the forehead when he was four or five, holding him on his lap and gently enclosing Nicky’s hands between his own, palms together. _Hands together, softly so._ He remembers his mother reading him stories in Spanish from the children’s Bible. Nicky had always liked _Moisés_ and _Daniel y el Foso de los Leones_ best. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised that the freedoms he wanted in his life ended up being ones he had to fight for. He remembers his mother’s perfume and his father’s low voice, the warmth of Maria’s arm around him and the steady comfort of Luther’s heartbeat behind Nicky’s shoulders: strong, reliable; safe. _Little eyes shut tight._

He has been in Berlin for four weeks, and has not been to church once, and for the first time in three years Nicky is starting to feel like he can breathe to the full capacity of both lungs – and yet. He misses his parents. He misses his Mom. It hurts. _Father, just before we go, hear our prayers tonight._

The Klose family are charming and hilarious, and Nicky doesn’t remember ever laughing so much at home as he can during one evening meal with Jutta, Andreas, Kathi, Erik, and Peter. Three of them, he knows, have good English – but he refuses to let them talk to him in anything but German for now. He is here to learn. The Kloses engage in a variety of increasingly ridiculous charades to explain words that Nicky doesn’t know, and tease him gently over his pronunciation.

The trouble is, Nicky never expected to be homesick. He left South Carolina feeling drained and tired of existence, disgusted with himself and depressed with his faith, carrying around a sour ache in his gut over both the fact that his parents had sent him to gay conversion camp, and also the fact that it hadn’t worked. It’s easier, here, to be selectively forgetful about exactly how detestable and repulsive Nicky and his desires are. He doesn’t know if he misses his parents because he actually misses them or because, at 4,566 miles, there’s an awful lot of water between their fundamentalism and his deviant soul.

When Jutta asks him if he would like to phone home, Nicky says no. “I’m writing to them,” he tells her, “it’s expensive to call.”

Jutta nods, a small pinch between her eyebrows, and folds her palm around his shoulder; squeezes warmly once. When she leaves the room there is a weight in the back of Nicky’s throat and a psalm on the tip of his tongue: 27:10 – _when my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up._ He curls his hands into fists against the fabric of the sofa where he’s sitting, bites his lips together, and doesn’t want to know whether the Lord will still take him up if it is he who forsakes father and mother.

 

*

 

“Erik said you asked about Church,” Jutta says, casually. It is a Saturday morning, the sky flush with September, bright and warm. Nicky is helping her to hang laundry in the small garden. “Do you want to start going here? The service is in German, of course.”

Nicky swallows, and fumbles the peg he’s holding to the floor. Stooping to pick it up, he takes a breath, collects his thoughts as well as the peg, and spins it in his fingers when he says “I’m not sure. I had a – It’s complicated – my, um. Religion and me. Right now.”

“A crisis of faith?” Jutta smiles at him over her shoulder.

“Actually, I’m gay,” Nicky blurts out without meaning to. His vision stings with an impending fog of panic at saying the words aloud. 

“Mm?” Jutta hums, finishing hanging the last shirt on the line. She steps back and brushes her palms together briskly. “And your American Church does not approve?”

Nicky wets his lips. He fidgets. This conversation is not one he was prepared for.

“I’m supposed to be getting better,” he mumbles.

“Getting better from what? Being gay, or being religious in a Church that thinks you can get better from being gay?”

Nicky’s reply sticks like too much popcorn, dry in his mouth. He blinks. The sun is too bright, stark white-gold in the garden, reflecting off the windows of the house.

Jutta nods her head towards the door. “Let’s have tea,” she suggests. Jutta is from Ostfriesland. When Nicky had commented on the amount of tea stashed in one of the kitchen cupboards, that had been Erik’s explanation.

“There’s a saying about the East Frisians,” he’d smirked,  “ _Ostfriesische Gemütlichkeit hat stets ein Tässchen Tee bereit **[1]**_. They call it Teeland, you know. You wait until Christmas, we will visit Mama’s family and this?” he’d indicated the tea cupboard that had Nicky mesmerised. “This will look like a cute little taster selection.”

In the kitchen, watching the laundry dance on the line through the window, Nicky inhales the steam from his mug, the smoky, strong richness of Assam and Ceylon tickling his nose. Jutta takes her cup with cream and rock sugar but her children drink it straight and black. Nicky, used to American Starbucks, is tempted by the sweet milky version, but doesn’t want to look like he can’t take the bitter strength of the drink the way Erik and Kathi do.

“Did somebody teach you to carry this like a pain?” Jutta asks him, quietly, through the smokescreen of pouring her cream. It rises like a cloud through the tea, swirling and decadent, reminding Nicky of the way tornadoes gather in the sky.

He closes his eyes; concentrates on the scent of his own cup. He nods.

“I don’t know how that feels,” Jutta says next, which surprises Nicky – it sounds like it should be a harsh statement, something that brushes his feelings aside like a brittle, brisk garden broom. Instead, on Jutta’s soft and homely tongue, it sounds gentle, honest, and sad. “Nobody can know how another’s pain feels. But I can tell you that this is not something that should hurt, Nicky. If you would like, maybe we can try and find a good painkiller for you while you are here.”

Nicky thinks about Erik’s biceps before he can help himself, the cotton of his t-shirts pulling taut over the muscle, and the crooked autumnal huskiness of his laughter. He thinks about Kathi last night, open and casual as she sat sprawled in a wicker armchair with her legs thrown wide and careless over the arm, calling the actress on TV “hot” without offering any caveat about only meaning she was beautiful. He thinks about the shame that had choked him back at home.

“That would be good,” he whispers.

 

*

 

Nicky has been in Berlin for seven weeks and the leaves are beginning to shift colour now, at the end of September. From the window in his room he can see an almond tree across the street, its crown melting into a buttery soft yellow; more golden each day. It reminds him of the endless stretches of cornfields back home, only softer. Or perhaps that’s the light – less fierce glaring sun here in Germany in September. Everything mellows, including Nicky’s angst.

 _Die Angst_ , a German noun meaning _fear_ or _anxiety_. It rolls from the back of Nicky’s tongue to the front of his mouth, pushed forward with deliberation, a shove from his throat. He wets his lips. According to his dictionary, if you pair _die Angst_ with _der Gegner,_ meaning _rival,_ you get a formidable opponent. If you pair it with _der Hase_ , however, a hare; then you get a coward. That versatility amuses and impresses Nicky in equal measure. _Angst_ when used in English is so much less flexible, so much weaker. There are no English words that twist _Angst_ into anything other than a problem to be solved.

Erik walks him to Church on his eighth Sunday in Berlin. Twice, Nicky changes his mind on the way. The first time, it’s because he remembers the crushingly panicked feeling in his chest when he sat through his father’s services last summer, the vice around his ribcage that meant breathing short and hard through his nose, sweating in his Sunday best and scrunching his eyes up tight like wrinkled currants. If anyone saw, they probably thought he was praying extra hard. They probably thought he needed that.

The second time they are right outside the Church steps and Nicky falters on the threshold, teetering back and forth, feeling a little like he’s balancing on the edge of the abyss. The mouth of the Church door yawns at him, a great, gaping dark maw offering to swallow him whole in his sinfulness and spit him back out clean. Nicky thought that was what he wanted but now, here, standing on the edge – he’s not so sure.

“There’s Oma,” Erik says, brightly, waving to his grandmother. Jutta had mentioned when she came for lunch two weeks ago that he might want to join her at Sunday service sometimes and Erik’s grandmother, his father’s mother, had smiled and said he would be welcome anytime. It didn’t sound anything like the time his father had said Zachary Goldman would be welcome to convert to Christianity and join their Church anytime, but Nicky’s stomach had still clenched queasily at the memory.

“You know you can change your mind,” Erik murmurs while his grandmother is still crossing the road. Nicky knows he is tense. The sun is shining bleakly, pale, the sky a sensitive dove grey. It’s neither threatening nor encouraging, and Nicky thinks about _die Angst_ again, about _Angstgegner_ and _Angsthase_ and wishes he could be less of the latter.

“I know,” he eventually says, swallowing the fear in his throat. “I have to try.”

“Okay,” Erik nods. “I’ll wait in the café down the street,” he says, and Nicky feels a tiny pocket of warmth unfold somewhere deep in his stomach, like the smallest edge of the scrunched up holey paper bag that his insides have become just unfurled, smoothed itself out and relaxed. “Sit on the end of the pew,” Erik winks, “then you can escape easily if you want.”

Nicky wouldn’t dare, but Erik winking at him makes him feel sick in an entirely different way from the nausea that is telling him to run away from the building and the faith he’s decided to try and make some peace with. He takes a breath; turns to face the Church again while Erik kisses his grandmother hello and asks how her week has been. Nicky draws up his chest, remembers Romans 10:9, pockets his guilt and shoulders the cross of his sins, and determines to meet God halfway. He’ll bring back his faith so long as God, and his son, and his Church, bring their forgiveness the way it says in Romans: that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

 

*

 

It turns out that going back to Church isn’t the cure Nicky was looking for.

He keeps going, resolute and desperate as the season. Autumn marches on, pulling the city ever deeper into the shivering embrace of winter, and Nicky marches on, too. Pulls himself back into the clammy clutches of a religion he thought he could leave on another continent and a grief at himself he’d hoped to lay to rest.

One Sunday in the dregs of October, when Nicky is thinking about how Hallowe’en is so understated in Europe compared to America and how that feels strange but also cosy, Oma Klose sits down next to him on the bench outside Church after the service. Nicky is waiting for Erik, who still insists on walking him there and back every week even when it’s raining; even now that it’s getting colder every day. He’s late, today, but Nicky knew he was meeting someone from school to go over some exam notes, so he’s not worried.

“It makes you sad, doesn’t it,” Oma Klose says, and it isn’t a question. Nicky blinks at her. Behind them, the congregation are still slowly descending the Church steps, stopping to shake hands with the pastor and ask after each other’s children. “Church,” Oma clarifies, and Nicky notices that she pronounces _Kirche_ differently to how he has been taught, the _ch_ softer, hushed against her lips. “Why?” she asks. “It isn’t supposed to be about sadness.”

Nicky watches his own toes draw circles in the dry leaves that have gathered below the bench. “My father is a preacher,” he says, slowly, unsure if the terminology is right. “I don’t think I have the same sort of faith he does.”

“Of course not,” Erik’s Oma nods, “everybody has their own faith. That’s okay. We are all a little different. But if coming to this service isn’t bringing you peace then you should ask yourself why.”

Frowning, Nicky doesn’t know what to say. Oma Klose’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder, thin bird-like knuckles bristling from the ends of her fingerless gloves. “I don’t mean it is wrong to be sad about Church,” she says, patience sugaring the words like dusting on an apple tart. “I mean your belief shouldn’t be somewhere that you go to look for sadness. It should raise you up.”

“What if it can’t,” Nicky chokes, “what if that’s what makes me sad?”

“It can,” Oma Klose tells him firmly, and Nicky waits for the stomach acid despair that always comes when his parents insist that prayer and faith and loving Jesus and living a good life are all he needs to make him whole. All he feels, this time, is a flat nothing spreading through his gut, like a bottle of carbonated drink that’s been left with its lid off.

“One time,” Oma continues, “I asked my Sunday school teacher why God did not answer when I prayed for happiness. I was seventeen, like you, had my first broken heart and I think I wanted to find an excuse to stop believing because I was miserable. My teacher told me to remember that we are not given troubles in order to get over them or be better than them and turn away. We are given troubles because we are supposed to accept and embrace them. We’re not God, or Christ. We’re humans. Experiencing trouble is part of what makes our lives full, and only when our lives are full can we really embrace God.”

“Are you preaching again, Oma?” Erik interrupts, hands on his hips as he leans against the tree next to the bench. Nicky had not noticed his approach, too intent on listening to everything he’s been taught about how to live less sinfully be unravelled through a simpler, kinder theology. He doesn’t know if that’s a cultural difference or one of translation, but he almost wishes Erik was a little later so that Oma Klose could keep preaching.

“You’re a heathen,” she tells Erik cheerfully.

“I know,” he agrees. “And you love me anyway.”

“What sort of Christian would I be if I didn’t?” she purses her lips at him, her eyes narrowed to tiny currant-like beads in the leather of her face. She pats Nicky’s shoulder before she gets up, and before she takes her leave she offers him one last piece of advice to take home and chew over. “It’s not your job to get your troubles taken away. Your job is to see them for what they are, and embrace them – if you want to live in Christ’s image you need to recognise the cup of bitterness but also drink it down, hm?”

“Should’ve been a theologian, Oma,” Erik sings, with a smirk and a roll of his eyes.

“Shut your trap,” Oma Klose shoots back at him. “And tell your sister she owes me a visit and one of those zucchini cakes she keeps promising.”

Erik tips her a salute, and offers his hand to Nicky, who is still feeling Oma Klose’s words like the slap of cold wind in his face. “Come on,” he laughs. “Don’t spend so much time talking to Oma, she’ll turn you into a baby Bonhoeffer, he’s her hero. Though it would be kind of cool if you became a spy,” he mused, slinging an arm around Nicky’s shoulders as he steered them both down the street in the opposite direction from his grandmother.

If embracing his suffering means letting Erik Klose tuck him up against his warm side and crack jokes about his future career as a secret agent, one hand gesturing wildly along with his ideas and the other rubbing briskly up and down Nicky’s arm, well. Nicky thinks he can probably live with that.

 

*

 

November is a month of revelations.

On a gloomy, rain-washed Saturday morning, Nicky is leaving the bathroom still only half awake. He stayed up last night playing cards with Erik after they’d both helped each other out with homework – Nicky had Math, which Erik is much better at explaining than his teacher, and Erik had an English essay which he wanted proof-read. Kathi had gone out with friends, and Jutta and Andreas were having dinner out, so Erik and Nicky had stayed home to study and babysit Peter. It had turned into cards by nine p.m. and continued until the small hours on Erik’s bedroom floor.

There is a girl lounging in Kathi’s bedroom doorway, opposite the bathroom. Two girls, Nicky realises as he scrubs a fist over one eye and hides a yawn in his wrist. Kathi herself is looped around her friend’s neck, her face nuzzled into the side of her neck.

“Sorry,” Nicky blinks. His voice is scratched with lack of sleep. “Were you waiting?”

“No problem,” Kathi smirks, without moving her face. The words are thick, mumbled against the other girl’s skin, but Nicky can hear the amused lilt to her voice. He blinks again.

“You must be Nicky,” Kathi’s friend says.

“Yes,” he nods, “I’m--”

“The exchange brother, I know,” she grins, and her teeth are shark white and glistening in the wide space of her smile. “Kathi tells me she will bring you to a club with us soon, for a real Berlin education.”

“Oh,” Nicky fumbles, is not awake enough to find the correct German to say that he’s sure that isn’t legal. “Um. Thanks?”

Kathi’s friend laughs, brutal and proud and honey-rough at the edges. She murmurs something into Kathi’s hair which Nicky doesn’t catch, and earns herself a slap on the wrist and a wriggle of Kathi’s freckled legs. He realises, in a citrus-sharp second of observation, that neither girl has anything beyond knickers and t-shirts on.

“Behave,” Kathi whispers, giggling. Then: “Nicky, this is my girlfriend Nadine.”

“Hi,” Nadine hums, wiggling her fingers in a flicker wave, leaning back against Kathi. They look comfortable and relaxed, smudged with sleep still, their hair collectively terrible. Nicky knows instinctively that Kathi doesn’t mean _girlfriend_ the way the girls from his school in Columbia do, the way they chat about getting coffee with their girlfriends or sharing a ride to school with a girlfriend – this is a different type of girlfriend, he can tell. This is the type of girlfriend that makes his heart hurt and his mouth dry and his brain fog, the type of girlfriend Nicky is supposed to call unclean and shameful; the type of girlfriend which means Kathi, like him, must be headed for Hell.

He gathers up the drips and splotches of that railroad of thoughts, and thinks that at least, with Kathi down there too, Hell will be a party.

“So, um, your sister’s...” Nicky fumbles later, in the kitchen with Erik. “Your sister and – Nadine...”

“Two years,” Erik tosses over his shoulder as smoothly as he tosses the pancake he’s cooking. “Or nearly. They’re looking for a flat together now.”

“So she’s – they’re – lesbians?” Nicky needs it confirmed, despite feeling foolish as he draws out the first syllable of the word and the _sh_ at the end of _lesbisch_ , like he isn’t sure if it’s an acceptable word to use at all.

“Yep,” Erik hums nonchalantly. He ladles more batter into the pan. “Actually I think Nadine may be bisexual, but she’s lesbians for Kathi. And Kathi’s always been as gay as a dandelion. Runs in the family.”

“Runs in,” Nicky cuts himself off, the words catching against his teeth and making him cough. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Oh, honey,” Erik flips him a smile, bunched at the side of his mouth, as he hands over a plate of pancakes. Nicky stares at his wrist and wonders how he has failed to notice, before now, that Erik wears a rainbow wristband. He must have been distracted by the rest of Erik’s glorious muscled arms in the t-shirts he still wears around the house in November. “Didn’t you realise? We think Peter is straight at least, but he is only twelve. Plenty of time.”

 

*

 

“Do your parents know?” Nicky asks Erik three days later. It is November 7th, a Wednesday, and they are having after school coffee and cake in Barcomi’s on Bergmannstraße. Nicky likes Kreuzberg. It feels absolutely nothing like anywhere he has been in South Carolina. It’s refreshing to be in a place which is so far from anything he associates with home that he can stop feeling like his skin doesn’t fit properly for a while. Nicky doesn’t belong in South Carolina, he has realised, with its white picket fences, its peaches and its sunny southern smiles to cover up the discrepancy between social classes. He doesn’t belong in that world where everyone knows everyone else and the first question asked of newcomers is which Church they attend. Watching the people in Kreuzberg through the windows of Barcomi’s, Nicky feels the tension unspooling from his shoulders. There is an affinity here: Kreuzberg is nothing like where Nicky grew up, and neither is he.

“Of course,” Erik shrugs in response to his question. “We told them together when I was fifteen and Kathi was eighteen. They weren’t surprised.”

Nicky wraps both of his hands around his coffee cup, the hot ceramic against his palms and the thick earthiness of the scent of his drink are grounding; necessary. His fingers are trembling, but he blames it on the caffeine.

“I was fifteen, too,” he makes himself say.

Erik doesn’t flinch. Nicky holds his breath for some reaction, some surprise, some indication that Erik – like Nicky’s own parents – did not expect such a confession.

All he gets, however, is a soft “oh?”

Taking a slow, shaky breath, Nicky puts his coffee cup back down before he drops it. A shiver slops over the side and trickles down the edge of the cup, yellow-brown dribble staining against the smooth white. It could be a metaphor, Nicky thinks, for the conservative values he was raised on – except there’s sugar in his coffee and there’s nothing sweet about the things he suddenly, urgently, wants to tell Erik. He folds his hands together in his lap under the table, squeezes one set of fingers with the other to try and calm the tremors, and keeps his eyes on the street.

“Mine were surprised,” he says, “my parents.”

“They’re very religious, aren’t they?” Erik guesses correctly.

Nicky nods. “It was... I didn’t, I...” He stops, presses his teeth into his bottom lip like he’s buried the right words there and can dig them out. When he swallows, he can taste the bitterness of his coffee again. His fingers tingle with memories of ice.

Erik presses the side of his own cup against his cheek and waits. Nicky can’t make himself meet his gaze.

Eventually, he finds “they don’t agree” from somewhere deep in the archives of his words, a careful jigsaw teased out from the oppressive drudgery of _don’t speak ill of your elders_ and _this is what is best for you_ and the indoctrinated hierarchy of God – Priest – Parents – Teachers – Kids.

“It’s okay,” Erik murmurs, and reaches over the table with his free hand to nudge the backs of two fingers against Nicky’s sleeve.

“No,” he shakes his head, tight and aching, tears caught in his throat. “It’s not.”

“No, it’s not,” Erik agrees, solemnly. “It’s not okay that they don’t agree. But you’re okay.”

“I’m not,” Nicky half gasps, and covers his face with his hands because Erik is gentle and charming and handsome and kind and far, far too attractive to see Nicky cry. That, more than anything, feels likes divine punishment.

“You know,” Erik muses, “there’s that saying about not fixing things that aren’t broken? I always thought there should be more to it. Because if something isn’t broken and you try and fix it anyway then you can end up breaking it after all.”

His fingers knead slowly at the fabric of Nicky’s sleeve, a quiet thrum of fingertip rhythm against the top of Nicky’s arm. It’s like a heartbeat, steady and soothing, and Nicky allows himself to focus on what he can feel there instead of the throbbing in his head.

“They made me go to a,” he whispers, but has to stop again, still wary of saying the words aloud. Back home, he never spoke about Exodus. His parents called it summer camp, or prayer camp, and Nicky didn’t talk about it with his friends. Everyone went to different camps in the summer. It was easy to ignore and safer to pretend. If people asked about that summer Nicky would say something vague about Bible study and the mountains. He says “summer camp” now, to Erik, and cringes.

Summer camp sounds like something fun.

“I’m guessing you don’t mean the kind of summer camp where I go with friends and tents and have bonfires and swim naked?” Erik smiles. Nicky’s stomach turns a somersault. He eyes what’s left of his apple caramel and walnut cake suspiciously.

“I – no,” he admits. “It was... inside, mostly, um. Nakedness was definitely not encouraged.”

“Sounds boring,” Erik scrunches his nose. “Like a camp for straight people.”

“That was the idea,” Nicky murmurs, and watches the way the overhead lights glint off the tines of his fork, balanced on the edge of his plate. “I mean it wasn’t a camp for – for straight people – but it was by the time we went home. Or it was supposed to be.”

“Trying to fix something that wasn’t broken,” Erik says again.

Nicky swallows, hard, and traps his hands between his thighs because they are cold and clammy and will not stay still. He feels like wire stretched too taut; like something that has been wound up for too long without being allowed to move. Erik is watching him, his eyes a woodsy halfway between brown and green: pine bark, sage, nepeta stems.

“Do you think,” Nicky whispers, ashamed of the catch in his voice and ashamed of the words he knows he’s about to spit up whether he wants to or not, “do you think I’m – can I be – unbroken? Again?”

Canting his head to one side, Erik purses his pretty mouth up into a miniature smile, a budding echo of the grin he’d sported moments before. “Do you know the Asian pottery style, where they mix gold with glue to fix the cracks when something breaks?” He taps two fingers against his heart and his smile blossoms again, an opening rose. “Forget gold. We’ll add some glitter to yours.”

 

 

[1] East Frisian hospitality always has a cup of tea waiting


	3. Experiences and Experiments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nicky has experiences and experiments.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, warnings for small references to Nicky's time in conversion therapy and his general anxiety about sexuality and faith. One (slightly more detailed) panic attack happens in this chapter. Mentions of underage drinking to an extent (depending on whether you're looking at European or US laws for the most part!) 
> 
> Many thanks to everyone who has left such nice comments and feedback, I really appreciate it! And thanks as always to my main girl moonix and our fellow squad bamf capncrystal for beta-reading <3

Kathi’s birthday falls at the end of November. Nicky buys her a mug with ears and a cat face, and some hiking socks. She’s spending the following weekend in the countryside with Nadine and some of their friends but before that, on the weekend of her actual birthday, she’s going partying and she is determined that Erik and Nicky are coming too. Nicky offers fifteen minutes of half-hearted protest about being underage, more because he thinks someone should be responsible and point this out than because he actually cares about that.

Well, he would care about getting caught consuming alcohol underage in a nightclub in a foreign country, but as Kathi insists: he isn’t going to get caught.

“You’re not underage for beer anyway,” she shrugs, “your America is so restrictive. Twenty-one years old for the fucking piss-water you guys call beer anyway? Ridiculous.”

“Also, I’ll bring you home at midnight, Cinderella,” Erik adds. They are in Kathi’s room, something upbeat and European on the stereo, as she gets herself ready. Apparently, that means experimenting with four different black vests that all look much the same to Nicky, and a lot of smudged eyeliner. Her hair is an artful shambles, and there’s a shameless parade of speckled love-bites marching down the side of her neck. “There’s a rule if you’re under 18, you have to leave the clubs at midnight. But you’re allowed in them.”

“So boring,” Kathi sighs, stripping out of the fourth vest and holding it up in front of her face with an inscrutable but judgemental expression. “Parties hardly even start that early. Suppose that’s why they send babies home,” she tosses a mischievous smirk over her shoulder at Nicky and her brother. “Before the real fun gets going.”

Her bra is faded cherry pink. Nicky has only just noticed.

Erik lounges back on Kathi’s bed and lazily throws a screwed up pair of shorts at her. They thwack against her shoulder with an innocent flop of fabric.

“All your vests are the same,” he complains. “Just pick one.”

“You don’t understand,” Kathi waves this aside.

“Yes, I do, you’re a lesbian,” Erik grins and rolls his eyes at Nicky. “Lesbians love black vests,” he explains in a stage-whisper. “They think there’s a difference between their work black vest, their sleeping black vest, their girlfriend’s black vest, their Sunday black vest, their party black vest, their lucky black vest, their sexy black vest... and really, they’re all the same. Maybe one has some lace or something. Black vests are a sacred icon on the altar of lesbianism.”

Kathi flicks him an unimpressed glare. “Because you don’t rip the sleeves off your hundreds of band t-shirts and own a patchwork denim jacket, Mr Gay Fashion Parade 2001.”

“Mmm, but all my t-shirts have got different bands on them,” Erik says, and laughs when Kathi flips him both fingers and tells him to lay off on her birthday.

They dress Nicky in a white t-shirt that clings across his shoulders – something it didn’t do when he left America, and he wonders briefly if he’s getting fitter or fatter. Most likely fatter, he thinks ruefully, because Andreas is a genius in the kitchen and there’s that small fact that Nicky doesn’t feel like he’s choking on dinner every night when no one blesses it before they eat. He zones out for a second thinking about the Kaiserschmarrn they’d had as a late-night second dinner the day before. Kathi arranges a floaty, colourful light cotton scarf in an artful drape around his neck. It smells like Erik.

“It’s a shame neither of us has a waistcoat that would fit him,” Kathi hums. “You need to get taller, Nicky. Taller and broader and then you can wear all our clothes.”

“All the black vests you’ve ever dreamed of,” Erik adds drily.

“Black vests create equality,” Kathi says sanctimoniously, adjusting Nicky’s scarf again. “Everyone’s in a black vest? Then everyone’s equal. Just as it should be. Come on, we’re late.”

 

*

 

For Christmas, Nicky sends his parents a parcel with some conservative and acceptably Christian gifts which will make it through customs, and a t-shirt covered in rude German slang for Aaron. He includes a note tucked inside the folds of fabric explaining what the phrases mean – after Kathi helps him translate some of the less familiar ones – with instructions to keep that away from the adults. _Tell them it’s a translation of the Lord’s prayer or something_ J he adds at the bottom.

“Will you miss your family for Christmas?” Jutta asks him on their way to the post office.

Nicky thinks about it, about all the carol services he doesn’t have to sing at this year, all the austere nativity sermons he doesn’t have to listen to, and the quietly tasteful Christmas Eve at Church. On Christmas day itself his parents hold an open house for members of their congregation, and Nicky has spent the last several years resenting having so many people stopping by his home to talk about the birth of Jesus. He thinks about his mother’s home baked rosca de reyes, festive food being one of the few traditions she had brought with her from her home country. They don’t talk about Maria’s life in Mexico before she met Luther. Nicky doesn’t even know if he has Mexican cousins.

“I’ll miss the sweet tamales my mom makes,” he decides. “But I’m excited to have Christmas here.”

It’s December 4th, and already Nicky has been initiated to German Christmas with a trip to the Christmas market four streets from the Kloses’ house and an advent calendar which he did not expect and which is vastly more exciting than anything he received as a child. Kathi and Jutta had hung a string of twenty-four little felt pockets on the wall over his bed while Nicky was at school on the first of December, each one filled with a small gift.

He calls home on his mother’s birthday, December 12th. Her voice is whisper-soft and far-away, the thin cotton thread of space between Nicky speaking and Maria answering feels too loud, too obvious – like so much emptiness that what they leave unspoken might spill out unintentionally. Nicky’s fingers grip the phone too tight and his palm sweats against the plastic. Maria asks generic questions about school, and Church, and if he is enjoying himself, and Nicky feels robotic in his answers because he can’t tell her that he feels free here, like the thick yoke their religion had placed around his shoulders is something he shrugged off at the airport when he left America.

He can’t tell her that school is easier because nobody knows him as Minister Hemmick’s son. He can’t tell her that the Church he attends with Oma Klose is open and friendly, that just last week he talked to Oma’s friend Inge about Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians that if a person cannot abstain from sex then they should marry rather than be eaten up with desire – and Inge being seventy-three and saying “that’s why I support gay marriage, you see, it’s what Paul said. You got desires, you better marry them and make them dignified.”

Nicky wants to laugh hysterically when he realises that this German Church is his father’s mission and namesake all in one – _Evangelisch-Lutherische –_ and yet stands for so many things that all his father’s missionary work rejects.

“And are you feeling – better?” Maria asks him, lowering the pitch of her voice as if God himself might be listening on the line. “You know. About your – troubles, I mean.”

Nicky thinks about Kathi and Nadine kissing on the sofa. He thinks about Erik’s wristband and his laughter and the smell of his scarf, which is still under Nicky’s pillow. He thinks about Jutta telling him this shouldn’t hurt, about Oma Klose and Christ’s cup of poison, about Erik fixing his fractures with glitter glue; about being a little more _Angstgegner_ and a little less _Angsthase_ and dancing hot and sticky and humming up against Erik in the bar on Kathi’s birthday.

“Yes,” he says. “A lot better, actually, Mom.”

When he hangs up, Nicky closes his eyes and tries, briefly, to tally his sins since coming to Germany. He stops at twenty-one, the same number of sins as the children of Israel had acts of rebellion, and reminds himself of Romans 3:23 under his breath: all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.

 

*

 

In the quiet space between Christmas and New Year, after the glut and excess and cheer of Christmas Eve where Nicky ate more Lebkuchen and Zimtsterne than was probably healthy; and before the trip to Ostfriesland to welcome in 2002, Erik decides they’re going out again. They haven’t been out since the night that Nicky had too much Glühwein at one of the markets and ended up being put to bed by a laughing-mouthed Kathi and a softly amused Erik, who had slept on Nicky’s bedroom floor in case he felt ill in the night. He’d felt excruciatingly embarrassed in the morning, and declined all their offers of nightclubs and dancing and beer since.

This time, Erik isn’t listening. “Yes, we’re going,” he insists. “My ex-boyfriend texted me, I feel itchy and gross thinking about him. I need to go out and forget, and Kathi won’t, she’s got some girl thing. Come on, Nicky, please. I’ll pay.”

“You always pay,” Nicky frowns. Erik and Kathi never let him spend his allowance on their nights out. He wants to ask about Erik’s boyfriend but it feels invasive and in any case, he still shrinks away from the expression; cringing in on himself like he expects wrathful Old Testament justice to rain down upon his head if he refers to homosexual relationships out loud. Nicky is learning, slowly unfolding in this place and with these people who make so much more sense than home ever did, but it’s hard. It’s a slow process.

“That wasn’t a no,” Erik bounces on his heels.

“It wasn’t a yes,” Nicky replies.

Erik sighs, folds himself up into Nicky’s space on the sofa and puts his head on Nicky’s stomach. Nicky lets his comic slip sideways so he can turn the full force of his disapproving frown on Erik, but Erik bats his eyelashes and looks pleading and something shifts in Nicky’s brain, buzzing like alarm bells. Erik’s hair smells like smoked applewood and the outdoors. Nicky wants to put his face in it.

“Please?” Erik whines.

“Okay, fine,” Nicky huffs, and smacks at Erik’s face with his comic. Iron Man gets wrinkled under his thumb on the cover, a disgruntled crease of red and gold. “You have to do my eyeliner though.”

“Yes,” Erik punches the air and shimmies back into a sitting position, poised exuberantly on the edge of the sofa. Nicky immediately misses the weight of his head. “You should wear that shirt Kathi gave you for Christmas, too. So hot. If we see my ex you have to be pretend to be my new boyfriend, okay? Promise.”

“Is that why we’re going out? Because you want him to see you and be jealous?” Nicky raises an eyebrow. Erik fidgets. “I’m sure you could find a much more impressive fake new boyfriend than me, and I could stay here and have a cosy night in with Tony Stark. What about your friend Hugo? He’s pretty.”

“He’s in Dresden visiting family,” Erik pouts. “Also, stop talking yourself down to try and get out of a fun night out. It’s bullshit, you know you’re hot.”

Nicky clenches his jaw in the hope that, somehow, taut muscles in his cheeks will be enough to stop them flushing an awkward baby pink. He knows it doesn’t work when Erik smirks at him and tickles his fingers across the inside of Nicky’s elbow.

“Aww,” he croons, “don’t you have a mirror in your room, you handsome thing? Seriously, though, you must have seen how the guys look at you when we go out. I’m quite jealous, none of them ever goggle at my arse like they do yours. You’re doing me out of suitors, you know.”

“Ugh,” Nicky covers his face with his comic and wriggles his legs on the sofa. “Shut up. Go away. Go and steal Kathi’s eyeliner then.”

He thinks about what Erik said all the way to the bar, wrapped in a coat that Andreas and Jutta gave him for Christmas because his South Carolina jacket was a hopelessly inadequate joke against the Berlin snow and temperatures below freezing. Nicky hasn’t got his head around Celsius measurements yet, but he isn’t all that worried – he knows its fucking cold, and that’s enough for him. If he misses anything about Columbia, it’s the sunshine.

Do the boys really check him out in the bars and clubs? Nicky doesn’t know if Erik was teasing or pushing his bribery to persuade Nicky to go dancing. He doesn’t know if Erik was right and he hasn’t ever noticed because he’s spent too long trying to switch all that off.

It’s a new year next week. He decides, while Erik chatters away about a film he wants to see and they walk side by side, hunched into their scarves against the snap of late December, that tonight he’s going to pay attention and see where it leads. The decision sends a nervous patter up his chest, adrenaline foxtrotting with anxiety, and Nicky balls his hands into fists in his pockets and clings stubbornly to his resolve. After all, a new year is always a chance for a fresh start. If it doesn’t work out, he can use the turn of the calendar to mark the turn of his delinquency and go back to keeping himself to himself.

Or, you know. Start making more of an effort and see how many boys he can kiss before he has to go home. Perhaps he can make it to eighteen before he turns eighteen.

He gets started within half an hour of arriving at SchwuZ. Erik is busy at the bar, laughing with the man pouring out a lethal looking row of rainbow coloured shots, a guy to whom Nicky thinks he’s been introduced once before; possibly one of Erik’s or Kathi’s friends. He leans against the wall watching the writhing dancers on the floor, awash in stroboscopic technicolour, pulsing bodies moving against one another to the pulsing beat. It thrums in Nicky’s throat and his eyes swim, the two shots Erik let him have swirling in his gut, bright pink and sticky luminous orange. Everything is heavy and bright and loud, thumping and thick with laughter, sweat, lust; ease.

The boy who snags his wrist is blond and slight, a little taller than Nicky with legs for days in baggy combat jeans. There’s a gap between his teeth when he smiles, and a slinky black tattoo around the top of his arm. His hair is gelled and spiked and the lights swim across his cheeks in mauve and scarlet and blue and then his hands are on Nicky’s jaw and they’re kissing, pressed together, without even knowing each other’s names. It’s hot and wet and tastes like salt and sour vodka shots. Nicky feels the guy’s teeth against his lip and his hands find the guy’s hips of their own accord and sink his fingers into the fabric of his sleeveless shirt, above the jut and bite of his leather studded belt.

It’s nothing like his fumbling first attempts with Zachary, and nothing like Nicky has frantically imagined in the shower. It’s nothing like the time he tried to kiss poor Deborah and felt his insides shrivel and recoil and his mouth turn away from the wrongness of how she felt so close to him. He still feels bad about that sometimes – but not right now, not at the edge of a heaving, heady dancefloor at a gay club in Berlin, being snogged by a skinny guy with an eyebrow piercing who smells like smoke and the sweet promise of damnation 

Not right now.

 

*

 

He wakes the next morning with a mouthful of regret and a fist of guilt in his stomach. Caught in the tractor beam of a panic attack, Nicky rolls out of bed and retches on his knees.

He’s got himself under control by the time Jutta brings him tea and asks him if he’ll hang out with Peter while she runs to the supermarket to get some last minute supplies for their trip. She touches his forehead and tuts, clucking over his too-bright eyes and the flush in his cheeks.

“Did my son give you too much to drink again?” she hums, and Nicky doesn’t know how to tell her no, he’s not hungover, just having an existential crisis.

He watches cartoons listlessly with Peter, each of them half asleep propping up opposite ends of the sofa. There’s a silly, giggling, half-hearted game of footsie in the advert break, and then Peter flops back against the cushions in his dressing gown and sighs. “It’s such a long way to Großefehn,” he complains. They are scheduled to leave tomorrow. “Five hours.”

Nicky thinks about the time he and his parents drove to Nashville for a Baptist convention, which was their idea of a holiday. “We’ll make some mixtapes to listen to on the way,” he decides.

“As long as you don’t let Erik choose,” Peter pulls a face. “He likes techno.”

“Does he?” Nicky can’t help the bubble of laughter that pops on his lips, and then he remembers the awkward silence on the way home last night and the fact that he let another boy do things with his tongue inside his mouth, and his insides concertina themselves back into pleats of despair.

When Jutta gets home with three bulging bags of snacks, Nicky excuses himself back to his room to have another fit of anxiety. He’s pacing the narrow space in front of the window when Erik knocks twice and lets himself in. Nicky stops mid-stride, his hands fisted in his hair, and blurts “are you mad at me?” in English. The words feel strange and inadequate.

“Am I – no?” Erik replies, also in English. “Why would I be?”

“I just,” Nicky starts, and pauses to swallow the thick slime of guilt that is clogging his throat. He fumbles in the dark for the right words in German. It feels clumsy to talk to Erik in English after all these months, like Nicky is putting up barriers even though Erik is near fluent. He can’t remember anything except _Gott ist die Liebe, läßt mich erlösen_ , the closing hymn from last Sunday’s service. “I thought you,” he gives up, and settles for his native language. “That guy? And I was, and we, and on the way home it was so – it was like – I’m sorry,” Nicky tumbles, his tongue lame and his head hurting, and feels his eyes prickling just a little too late to stop himself from bursting into tears.

Erik looks stunned. “Hey, hey,” he murmurs, catching hold of Nicky’s wrists and running his thumbs softly over the bones there. “Don’t – shh – it’s fine, it’s fine. Come here.” He folds Nicky up close against his chest, wraps him in his arms and rubs his shoulders, the movements warm and soothing, not the brisk and cursory touch of someone encouraging him to man up. Nicky leans his weight against Erik and allows himself to sob into his jumper for several minutes, a litany of sodden apologies spilling from the store of them he’s been saving to barter for redemption.

“I thought you were mad at me because I kissed that guy,” he gets out after a space, his mouth a heavy, damp cave of despondency. He rubs his cheek against the wool of Erik’s jumper. His fingers flex helplessly on air, arms limp and useless at his sides. Erik’s hands are still smoothing patterns over Nicky’s shoulders.

“What, last night?” he hums. “Of course not. A little envious, maybe, but not angry.”

Nicky presses his lips together, worries his tongue against his teeth to hold back the disappointment that the spiky blond haired skinny dude is apparently Erik’s type.

“I didn’t even know his name,” he whispers.

“It’s Thomas,” Erik supplies. “And it’s fine, really. He’s okay.”

Sniffing, scrubbing the back of one wrist over his face, Nicky reluctantly pulls back from the safe space that Erik’s body creates, and plucks guiltily at the front of his jumper. “I’ve made your Christmas sweater all soggy,” he whispers, “sorry.”

“Stop saying that,” Erik rumbles. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

Nicky isn’t sure that’s true, because there was a definite slant of bitterness in Erik’s flippant _he’s okay_ description of Thomas, but he lets it go. They have to get ready for their trip anyway.

 

*

 

In January, Nicky catches a cold. He spends two days in bed feeling sorry for himself and then insists that he is definitely fine with going back to school in spite of Jutta’s concerns. Honestly, he just wants to get out of the house. Nicky has never enjoyed feeling cooped up.

He isn’t entirely sure how he makes it through the day without falling asleep in his classes. Dragging himself between them uses all of his energy and he just wants to go to sleep by lunch time. His English teacher sends him to the nurse’s room when he drifts off halfway though her class after lunch, and the nurse sends him home in a taxi. Nicky has forgotten his house key and nobody is home – Jutta and Andreas and Kathi are at work, and Erik and Peter are still at school. He huddles on the step in his winter coat and shivers, keeping himself awake by counting how many seconds he can last without his teeth chattering.

Erik gets home first. He puts Nicky in a hot bath and warms pyjamas on the radiator while he’s in there, makes sage tea with honey and tucks Nicky up in his bed with a cup on the nightstand. “You’re home early,” Nicky realises, his voice thick like syrup and sore in the top of his throat. It’s only half past two.

“Mm, let’s not mention that,” Erik says with the smallest smudge of a conspiratorial grin. He’s sitting on a beanbag on Nicky’s bedroom floor, leaning back against the side of the bed, his head tilted sideways so he can see Nicky’s face. “I hate last period Physics,” he whispers.

Nicky dreams about a swarm of honey bees, and then he’s back in the school yard when he was six, except he isn’t six anymore and it’s not Jesse Benjamin but Erik Klose who is telling Nicky he’s too brown to play on their soccer team, and after that he’s at summer camp and all the boys from his youth group are swimming naked but he’s too brown to join in there, too, and then the boys turn into young men and start making out on a video recording and there’s ice sticking to Nicky’s fingers. He wakes up in a sweat, his pyjamas tangled around his legs, hard in his pants and feeling like he can’t breathe. His mouth tastes like aniseed and it’s dark, late – Nicky blinks the sweat and his hair from his eyes and makes out 02:14 on the digital alarm clock beside his bed.

The door creaks open and Andreas’ head peeks round, backlit by the soft yellow table lamp that sits on the console table on the landing. “Is everything okay?” he murmurs. “Sounded like a bad dream.”

A bad dream, Nicky tells himself. There are no bees. There is no one teaching him how to be a real man. He does not have to pray.

Andreas slides around the door and into the room, perches on the edge of Nicky’s bed and touches the back of his hand to Nicky’s damp forehead. “I think you might have got a fever,” he says. “You’ve been asleep for nearly twelve hours and you’re very hot. We’ll call the doctor in the morning, okay?”

It turns out it’s a case of the flu, and Nicky is to stay home for two weeks of soup and sage tea, night sweats and falling asleep before the ends of the movies that are all he feels up to entertaining himself with. He goes through the entirety of Kathi’s Johnny Depp collection in the first week. Erik joins him halfway through _Chocolat_ on Friday night and says he’s staying home this weekend to keep Nicky company.

“You mean because you’ve just realised you can both perve on Johnny Depp together,” Kathi corrects, ruffling his hair. She’s wearing a black vest over her tartan shirt.

“They’re your videos,” Erik shrugs.

“At least I was classy when I tried to be straight,” Kathi pokes him in the arm. “You weren’t fooling anyone when you really, really, _really_ fancied Mel B in 1996.”

“Kathi, you are ruining my hot threesome,” Erik says, seriously. “I am sandwiched between Nicky, who is on fire right now – literally, he is still running a temperature – and French pirate Johnny Depp with a mouthful of delicious chocolate. I couldn’t expect you to understand. Go. Away.”

Nicky falls asleep before the end of the film again, his head pillowed on Erik’s shoulder, his neck cradled safely in the loop of Erik’s arm. His nose is brushing Erik’s neck, and his skin smells like fresh air and pine needles.

In February, they celebrate Peter’s 13th birthday with an evening spent bowling, Nicky helps Kathi to bake heart-shaped sugar cookies for Nadine, and Erik has a gruff and awkward argument with Andreas. Nicky doesn’t know what that’s about, but he blames Erik’s sulking and stomping around for three days on it, until it’s Saturday – the fourteenth – and Erik throws himself on Nicky’s bed and bites out “I’m so pissed off. Jan called me, we met up last week and Dad thinks I’m courting disaster. Like it’s even his business.”

Nicky’s stomach plummets faster than a broken elevator. They’ve never talked about it but he knows, instinctively, that Jan is Erik’s ex boyfriend who texted him at Christmas.

“Are you?” he asks. “Courting disaster?”

“Yes,” Erik snarls.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“That’s – not an answer,” Nicky frowns. He sits down next to Erik’s head and tentatively curls two fingers in his hair; tugs softly. Erik doesn’t react. “Is he super hot?” Nicky asks.

One of Erik’s excellent shoulders hunches in half a shrug. “He’s okay.”

“You can do better than okay, Erik.”

“So can you, but you were still only kissing Thomas when we went out at Christmas.”

“You’re deflecting,” Nicky sings, tugging Erik’s hair again. “Don’t pretend you’re being a butthead because of me kissing some okay guy two months ago.”

“I can’t believe you just called me a butthead,” Erik narrows his eyes up at Nicky, who laughs.

“Don’t be a butthead, then.”

“What if I want to be a butthead.”

“Do what you like,” Nicky says lightly, ignoring the pressure in the back of his chest that wants him to come down hard on Andreas’s side. “But don’t expect any sympathy.”

Erik grumbles mutinously under his breath, and folds his arms over his chest without getting up. Nicky laughs again, and winds his fingers further in Erik’s hair, scrubbing the tips a little across his scalp. He can see the way Erik’s shoulders relax at that, drifting gently out of their hunched, tight, wadded up position.

“Why’d you break up anyway?” he makes himself ask.

Erik’s mouth twists, a little knot of unimpressed remembrance. “He was a butthead.”

In March, Nicky goes with his class on a weekend trip to Dresden. He writes a postcard to his mom, and buys souvenirs for his next parcel to Aaron. Dresden is ornate, both sombre and splendid. Nicky takes reams of photos on his digital camera and texts Erik on and off throughout the weekend, trading jokes and updates, Nicky giving his impressions of the city and teasing Erik from afar about his Saturday morning hangover.

“Who are you texting all the time?” his friend Taylor asks him on the bus home, as Nicky tucks a smirk in at the corners over Erik’s last message about Peter’s horrific choice of ice cream. “Your boyfriend?”

“Haha,” Nicky says weakly, automatically, without thinking. “I’m not – I – um. No. My, he’s my. Um.” The word _brother_ makes him gag, it feels wrong, wrong, wrong, and Nicky can’t tell if the bile rising up in his throat is because he almost said yes and it’s a lie, or because he almost said yes and that means he’s admitting he’s gay to a school friend.

“Crush?” Taylor asks him sympathetically, her brown plaits swinging as she tilts her head to scrutinise his expression.

“Um,” Nicky says again, eloquently.

“Mm, tell me about it,” Taylor sighs, slumping back against the headrest. “I bet he’s dreamy. What’s he saying? He’s been texting back all weekend, maybe he’s into you...”

“How did you,” Nicky croaks, “I mean. Know?”

“Seriously?” Taylor’s eyebrows do a small dance and her mouth cracks into a grin. “The frantic messaging kinda gave it away. And the dopey look on your face every time your phone buzzed. Ohh, look, there it is again,” she giggles as – indeed – Nicky’s phone vibrates in his hand. “Even when you’re also looking like you got caught stealing cookies from the cookie jar. You’re so cute.”

“No, I mean,” Nicky worries his lip with his teeth. His fingers itch with wanting to slide his phone open and read his reply. “That I’m – that it was a – a guy. I mean.”

“Baby, you know the entire libretto for _West Side Story_ ,” Taylor points out. “And I don’t want to say that’s bad because it’s not – it’s pretty impressive, really – but come on. You dress nice, you mostly hang out with the girls, you sometimes wear eyeliner, you love musical theatre, you always pick up the dance steps quicker than anyone else in glee club. I just – made an educated guess. Okay, fine, maybe a stereotypical one, I’m sorry, but. I was right. Right?”

Nicky sighs this time, and leans his head against the cool glass of the coach window. It rattles behind him. “You were right,” he confesses, quietly.

Taylor purses her lips. “Hey, you know something? I have family in Arkansas. I know it’s not always – easy – I mean, you’re from the south, right?”

Nodding, Nicky finds her hand between them on the seats and picks it up in his own. He doesn’t know Taylor enormously well, but they have several classes together and he likes what he does know. Her parents are stationed here with the military. He knows what she’s trying to say.

“Thanks,” he tells her, gathering up his words like a drawstring and choosing them carefully, “that’s really nice of you. But I think – it’s not always easy, you’re right, but – I think I want to stop making that my problem. You know? It’s not easy because other people think they’re right. And I feel like – I feel like – if I keep on hiding and fighting and excusing myself because it’s not easy, it’s kind of like I’m agreeing with them. Or something. I don’t know, I haven’t figured it all out yet.”

Taylor squeezes his fingers and beams. She has an adorable smatter of freckles across her left cheek. “They call it gay pride for a reason,” she says. “Now, tell me about your crush.”

Nicky thinks about Erik, who he found attractive from their very first meeting back in August. He has been studious, diligent, in his determination not to admit that this has only got worse as his stay continued. What started as an acknowledgement of attraction has unfolded, opened itself up against his better judgement like a piece of origami that doesn’t want to be a bird anymore, and Nicky’s nausea has switched allegiance. It’s no longer a stomach ache of not wanting to admit that he’s into Erik. Since Christmas at least, it’s been a cramp in the base of his gut over not knowing who to confess it to and not being able to stop it; a stitch in his side – right up under his heart – over the constant worry that he’s too obvious, that he talks about Erik too much, that the rest of the Kloses must see how Nicky watches him and know. Funny, that trying not to crush and trying to crush quietly both make him feel like he’s been running and running – when running is, for the first time, the very last thing he wants to be doing.

“Oh my God,” he breathes, closing his eyes, and allows himself a thin trickle of smugness over the lack of contrition in his head for the casual blasphemy. “His entire existence is like a cosmic conspiracy of unfairness. I’m like, ninety-nine percent sure I’m in love with him.” 

                                                                                      

*

 

The problem with opening up to someone about Erik is that, now he has started talking about it, Nicky can’t stop. He texts Taylor constantly. She develops a habit of responding in lyrics from their favourite shows: [maybe this time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGROi4dwqU8) _;_ or [got a rocket in ur pocket?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wugWGhItaQA) _;_ or [there’s a feast waiting for u and u never even gotten a taste](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf_L5_Rl20g) _._ Once: [supposing that he says that ur lips are like cherries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY3gZMQpFOs) and Nicky knows she’s teasing him but can’t avoid the slip-slide into a fantasy land where Erik touches his thumb to Nicky’s mouth and murmurs things about roses and berries.

Which is stupid anyway, because no one would ever compare Nicky to sweet cream or hum pretty metaphors about the soft, fruity red ripeness of his lips. Erik’s the one with pale skin.

Well, that doesn’t help. Now he’s just imagining sliding into Erik’s lap and being the one who is smooth enough to do the sweet-talking himself which is really and truly a daydream, honestly, Nicky couldn’t sweet-talk a beer into getting him drunk. Still – it’s not a bad thought to go to bed on.

It is April before anything happens.

They have a fight – well, it’s more of a squabble, really – about Easter, of all things. Later, Nicky doesn’t remember how it started, but he’ll never forget how it ends: with Erik scowling and folding his arms tight across his chest and saying “suppose it doesn’t matter anyway, you’ll go home in the summer and forget about everything and go back to your closet and make believe you can pray this whole year away like all the other sacrilegious shit.” The words are laced with a grubby, sour sort of arsenic, like old milk and peach stones.

Nicky takes a long walk.

Spring is taking her time with Berlin. The trees are unfolding their bright and pale greenery and there is blossom sprinkled along some boughs, but the air is still icy, nipping at Nicky’s ears. He hunches into his jacket – it is at least warm enough to have hung up his winter coat by now – and hooks his scarf up over his nose. Erik’s words sting his cheeks with the cold wind.

It’s not the crass remark about religion that cuts, or the idea that when Nicky goes home he will play it straight again. Those things are probably true. He has studiously avoided thinking about going back to Columbia for several months now, but Nicky knows – rationally – that he’s not going to be able to waltz into his parents’ house wearing the t-shirt with the Brezhnev & Honecker kissing mural on it that he bought in a shop near Checkpoint Charlie, and break out into one of the dance routines he and Taylor choreographed to Britney Spears’ _Oops! I Did It Again_ last week. He doesn’t particularly want his father to call up his Baptist Convention friends and get them together for a party exorcism of his possessed son, infected with some European devil after a year of living an ‘alternative lifestyle’ in Germany. He’s not upset at the insinuation that prayer is an unhelpful sort of voodoo magic, either – Nicky already knows Erik’s staunchly agnostic and thoroughly disinterested in the powers of faith.

What’s chilling, worse than the April wind, is the idea that Erik thinks Nicky might want to forget any of this – this year, this place; these ideas and ways of looking at himself and the world. That he might want to forget about kissing Thomas at Christmas, or laughing along with Kathi and Nadine’s crude queer jokes, discovering eyeliner or having Erik and his friends insist he always looks good until Nicky almost starts believing it even when they’re not around. That he might want to forget the last few months of being able to look at himself in the mirror and not search out signs of sin, wondering why the devil’s mark is so difficult to see. That he might want to forget about Erik.

Nicky finds a bench and sits down, huddles in on himself and tries to catalogue all the Erik things he doesn’t want to forget, not ever, not even if he does have to go back to South Carolina and the narrow, suffocating closet his parents want him to live inside, decorated with a pasty white conservative version of a religion that, recently, Nicky has finally started to feel welcome in again. The realisation that it’s not a case of simply not wanting to forget this sneaks up on him like a cat winding itself around your legs in a silent plea for food that makes you stumble, curse, and then capitulate.

_I don’t want to forget you_ , he digs out his phone and texts Erik, the wind nibbling at his thumbs as he bounces them through the buttons. He pulls his shoulders in tighter. _I don’t want to go home._

He switches his phone off and shoves it into his pocket, not wanting to hear a reply right now.

When he gets back, he finds Erik in his room, tossing a rubber ball at the only blank space of wall not smothered with bookshelves or posters or photos. Nicky intercepts, catches the ball one-handed and bounces it in his palm a couple of time. “What are you doing?” he asks, quietly.

“Brooding,” Erik says, petulantly.

“You’re such a sulker.”

Erik crosses his arms and looks mutinous. “So?”

“I don’t want to go home,” Nicky repeats his text message.

There’s a beat of silence. The rubber ball sweats in Nicky’s suddenly nervous palm. Erik’s face shifts, unfurls into something softer, his eyes pinching a little in the corners the way they do when he’s worrying over his siblings or trying to untangle a math problem. The way they do whenever Nicky asks him something philosophical or serious, he realises. They way they did that afternoon in a cafe two months ago, weeks before his trip to Dresden, when Erik was talking through some complex theory of social accountability and Nicky was watching his mouth move and thinking _fuck, I am falling in love with you._

He sits up straighter on his bed, leans his head against the wall. “How come?”

Nicky shrugs. He thinks it should be obvious. “It’s better here,” he whispers, and then: “you’re right,” he admits, looking away, his throat closing up all hard and tight. Spring sunlight dapples through the trees outside Erik’s window, lacy in their underwear before donning the lush layers of summer foliage. “You’re right, I will – I will have to go back to pretending, pretending to like girls, and praying for it to be true. There’s no way I – my parents, I can’t just,” he presses his lips together; shakes his head. “I don’t want that, but I don’t know how to not do that when I’m there. I’ve never been able to not do that anywhere except here.”

Erik pats the bed beside him and beckons Nicky closer with a tilt of his chin. Nicky goes, tugged across the room like Erik has some invisible fishing wire wound around his finger and the hook is caught in Nicky’s chest; easy acceptance and kindness the sugary bait that he swallowed without stopping to think.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, and puts his face in Erik’s shoulder. He still smells like pine, and Nicky assumes that is all natural because it isn’t the soap or the laundry detergent. Nobody else smells like a forest.

“I’m sorry,” Erik sighs in echo, and tangles his fingers in Nicky’s hair. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff. I know it’s not what you want, I’m just – being bitter.” He sighs again, and turns his head, presses his face against Nicky’s hair. His nose is a sharp, straight line and Nicky can feel the warmth of his breath as Erik mumbles “I don’t want you to go, either,” right before his lips shape themselves into a sad, soft kitten of a kiss.

Nicky’s heartbeat threatens war.

He stays very still and finds Erik’s hand with his own, slowly and deliberately twisting their fingers together on top of his thigh. Erik’s fingers are longer than his, slimmer, and callused at the tips where he sometimes strums on an ancient acoustic guitar that used to belong to Andreas. There’s a small ink splotch on the knuckle of his thumb. Nicky brushes it with his own, watching the way Erik’s skin barely changes colour under pressure, unlike his which mutes out to a quiet, creamier shade with anything pressed up against it.

“I wish I could have found a boyfriend here,” he says, feeling hopeless and pathetic. “I’m never going to be able to have one back there.”

Nicky closes his eyes and the room fills up with a tense marmalade silence: chunky and bitter and sugar-sweet in unexpected places. He wants to cry, but he’s holding his breath, and Erik is so, so still, and his face is still in Nicky’s hair; Nicky can still feel the shape of his mouth amongst his curls, and all he can smell is the forest.

“If I kissed you right now,” Erik murmurs, “would you panic?”

_Yes_ , Nicky thinks, wildly and certainly, _yes, one hundred percent yes._ “No,” he says, feeling the fib linger on his lips, a little wet circle of a lie.

Erik huffs a tiny laugh. “Liar,” he hums, and there is a sinking dollop of disappointment in Nicky’s stomach like dropping a glob of cream into coffee, except then Erik untangles their fingers and runs two knuckles down the curve of Nicky’s jaw, tilting his chin up and kissing him anyway.

“Actually,” Nicky gasps after a beat.

“Mm, I know,” Erik agrees, “we shouldn’t. I shouldn’t,” but does it again.

His mouth is softer than Thomas’s was in December. Nicky expected him to taste like the pine needles he always smells of, but it’s different – more nuanced – there’s woodsmoke and honey and liquorice and something he can’t quite pin down. It’s a small kiss, really, nothing obscene about it – no hidden jewels; nothing unexpected. Just Erik and him, and the space between their mouths that isn’t a space anymore, and two fingers fluttering against his jaw, and the sound of their breathing suddenly louder than anything else in the room, even Nicky’s heartbeat which is still having a dance party with an extravagant bass line.

The panic, he finds, slides back down his throat like cough syrup.

It settles somewhere in his chest, warm and familiar but not invasive.

“Are you okay,” Erik whispers, the words falling straight from his lips onto Nicky’s, and he chases them with another tiny puckered promise of a kiss.

“Okay,” Nicky agrees. His hand is coiled in the fabric of Erik’s t-shirt, bunched up near the hem, soft cotton squeezing between his fingers. He doesn’t remember putting it there. He doesn’t let go.

“What about,” Erik continues: hushed, urgent; begging. “What about if you went to university here? You could,” he shifts, kisses the corner of Nicky’s mouth, and the curve of his cheek, “just go back to graduate and,” he kisses Nicky’s cheekbone, his eyelashes, his brow, “and then come back, and go to university here, with me, and we could.” Erik stops. His fingers are still twisted in Nicky’s hair. He uncurls them slowly, reluctantly, and pulls back.

Nicky doesn’t let go of his t-shirt.

“We could what?” he needs to know.

Erik swallows audibly. “Keep doing – this,” he says, shyly.

Nicky runs his tongue across his teeth, and tastes kisses and comfort, acceptance and appreciation and everything he has wanted since he first understood about physical closeness. His skin prickles.

“You’d – want that?”

The doubting realist which some cruel tutor has placed in his mind somewhere along the way comes to the fore and demands to be heard. This is too good to be true – surreal, impossible. Erik is beautiful and bold and could have any boy he wanted, there is no precedent that Nicky knows of for someone like Erik wanting to keep kissing a bag of neuroses and evangelic anxiety like him.

Shaking his head slightly on another huffy little snort, Erik’s mouth goes wry and self-deprecating when he says “since you first showed up, honestly. They said the new host student was a quiet guy from a Church school in America, and I was thinking – you know, studious and sweet and probably not interested in much of the same stuff as me. And then _you_ show up, all – ugh – with your – all this,” he flaps, loosely indicating Nicky’s torso, “and your – face – and, how dare you. How dare you be exactly my type and then also be gay and then be funny and nice and kind and adorable and all eaten up with shit things your parents said and make me want to just – fix that – and. Christ. Sorry, that’s – I didn’t mean, that’s insensitive. But, Nicky. Come on. You’re not fair.”

It’s all Nicky can do to remember to blink. He’s pretty sure he stopped breathing several minutes ago. He might, in fact, be dead. It is entirely possible, he tells himself, that he is definitely dead, because the idea of Erik being this sort of into him sounds a lot like Heaven, and the idea that Erik might be this sort of into him and Nicky might have to leave him and go back to Southern Baptist Repression Central is a very specifically crafted kind of Hell.

“Sorry,” Erik huffs again, and rubs his hands over his face. “I just really wish you could stay. I’ve been trying all year not to get attached because I knew you’d leave eventually, but I fucked up.” He peers at Nicky over the tops of his fingers. “I wish you could stay,” he whispers again, “and you wanted me to kiss you all the time.”

Nicky stares at him for a few more moments, and reminds himself to blink again, or his eyes will dry up and he will go blind. There are worse things to go blind for, he thinks, than staring at Erik Klose as he coughs up feelings he apparently has for you – and then stops himself. Blinks. Hard. That wasn’t helpful.

“Say something,” Erik pleads.

Nicky thinks about it, but not for long. When he finds his words and pushes them out onto his tongue and through his teeth and into the stifling, gasping air of Erik’s bedroom, he says “could I really go to university here, do you think?”

“You might have to do another year at the Gymnasium,” Erik tells him, but his eyes look greener, more hopeful. “I think, anyway, to get your Abitur. I can ask Mama? She knows about this stuff.”

Jutta, Nicky remembers, works in education.

“But won’t she think it’s weird,” he worries, pushing himself up on one elbow against Erik’s pillows. “If I stay, and we – do this – more?”

Erik shrugs. Nicky wants to put his hands on Erik’s shoulders, which have always been magnificent, and never let go. “Why should she? She likes you. She keeps telling me I should go out with a nice guy like you, instead of a tosser like Jan who cheats on everyone.”

“Fucking Jan,” Nicky mutters, fiercely. Erik’s never divulged exactly what went down between them, but every time Jan comes up in conversation he gets shifty and sulky while the rest of his family get vitriolic.

“See, you fit right in,” Erik risks a tiny smirk.

Nicky thinks of something awful, and traces the pattern in Erik’s faded pillow case as he says “what if I can’t stay, for some reason. What if I have to go back. I don’t think I could – if we started this and then I had to leave, I mean. That would suck.” He tries to swallow the knot of pain that balls up in his throat at the very idea. “That would be the absolute worst.”

Erik nods. “Maybe we should wait and see if you can stay, then,” he says, slowly. Nicky can hear the trickle of reluctance that dilutes the words, but he knows they are sensible. He nods, too.

“We’ll ask your Mama,” he decides, “and then when we know, we can... go from there.”

“Yes,” Erik agrees, frowning slightly. “So, let’s be clear – no snogging – I won’t kiss you – until we know if you have to go back to America forever and break both our hearts. Yes?”

“Yes,” Nicky nods once more, firmly.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“So that’s settled.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Fine.”

“Wait,” Nicky bites his lip, the panic starting to clamber back up from his chest, right where he doesn’t want it. He crunches his fingers tighter in Erik’s t-shirt, and pulls. “No, I changed my mind. Come here. We need to check it’s worth waiting for.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried my best not to stigmatise or vilify religion or religious beliefs, because ultimately I wanted to write a story about how Nicky learns to be okay with being gay and Christian, not one that just focuses on how his childhood faith exacerbated his teenage unhappiness with his sexuality. At the same time, I wasn't brought up with religious beliefs myself, and the majority of my knowledge comes from studying theologies as an agnostic, so please do get in touch if something seems wildly out of wack. Similarly, all my knowledge of gay conversion camps comes primarily from But I'm A Cheerleader and Latter Days, along with some google searches that got ugly and made me cry, which is partly why the references are not overly explicit.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Berlin, du bist so wunderbar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11199789) by [moonix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix)




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